


the entirety of time and space, it's all just waiting for you to take that first step

by weaslayyy



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-02
Updated: 2016-01-02
Packaged: 2018-05-11 03:21:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5612002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weaslayyy/pseuds/weaslayyy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve Rogers at his first Avengers Press Conference. An effort at integration in the 21st century, or alternatively, team building.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the entirety of time and space, it's all just waiting for you to take that first step

In the aftermath of what the press is calling “The Battle of New York,” Steve Rogers is confused about many, many things. The list might begin and also end with Tony Stark, but in the middle Steve’s managed to cram in things like:

  * **The Red Scare** (Sometimes he superimposes McCarthy’s face over one of his memories from back in the day, when he used to punch Hitler out for entertainment.)
  * **Vietnam** (Just. All of it. Everything. Vietnam. The Cold War.)
  * **The Resurrection of the KKK** (Talk about people who could use a good punch in the face. Maybe a kick in the crotch too, just hard enough to prevent procreation.
  * ****Opposition to the Civil Rights Movement** (Steve looks up the local congressman for New York City, just to make sure they voted the right way at the right time)**
  * **The paranoia surrounding the AIDS Crisis** (Steve knocks out two punching bags when he realizes that a friend of his from the clubs was one of the first to die, alone.)
  * **Ronald Reagan** (The actor? Twice? Really?)
  * **Government sanctioned torture** (Steve doesn’t like bullies, remembers Bucky’s face on HYDRA’s torture table and punches out three different walls over the course of 24 hours)



So maybe Steve isn’t confused, as much as disappointed: when he and Bucky used to dream about the future, they’d usually talk about living on the Moon courtesy of Howard Stark. Also, about a better world where they weren’t poor and hungry, and maybe Bucky could go and kiss the fella he had in Harlem without having to worry about breaking the law regarding intergender relationships.

Steve had figured that he’d have to have someone to step out with in the first place, regardless of gender, before he was allowed to worry about such transient things like the law and public morality and/or decency.

When Steve had just been thawed, he’d been hopeful: at SHIELD the two people that seemed to have the most respect were a black man and a white woman, which was definitely something he wouldn’t have seen back home. (The past, not home. He was home now, just about 70 years later than expected.)

Then, the Avengers happen. Loki happens. New York falls down, but not so much that it can’t be picked right back up again. After a few days of clearing up the rubble and ten different samples of Tony’s favorite types of shawarma, SHIELD decides that the best thing for their image as the team that saved the world is to talk about it. Loudly, and hopefully according to the script their PR team has so graciously typed onto these neat little cards for each team member to read while being interviewed by the press.

Steve reviews his notecards, memorizes the platitudes about “doing the best job they can,” and “we appreciate the support both at home and abroad,” and “I’m still adjusting to the future.” He shrugs his shoulders, practices his best fake smile in the mirror and decides that this, at least, will be because of something he did, rather than the serum Erskine provided.

And well, it can’t possibly be as bad as the USO trip, right?

The morning of, the Avengers huddle up in a hallway adjacent to the conference room they’re scheduled to be speaking in. Steve glances at everyone: notices how Banner’s hand is quaking just a little, how Stark’s jaw is clenched just this side of too tight. Barton looks perfectly composed, though he seems to be leaning a little more into Romanoff’s personal space than usual. Thor is fiddling with his hammer and smiles faintly when Steve catches his eye. Romanoff’s back is straight, but she’s wearing lipstick in a dark red that reminds him immediately of Peggy.

“It calls their attention to the part of me they’ll underestimate,” Peggy had said. “It’ll distract them while I mine them for information.” Then she’d shrugged, used her fingernail to define the sharp edge of her lips and turned to Steve with a wicked, dirty look in her eyes. “Sometimes, they’ll be so far gone that they won’t notice the punch coming until I’ve broken their nose.”

Steve knows without having to look that Romanoff’s lipstick is done to perfection, but he has to tamp down on the urge to scrape a hypothetical smudge off the corner of her lips. He thinks that means he likes her, but he also values his life so he decides not to vocalize that particular revelation.  

“So...Cap,” Stark begins, “you probably shouldn’t do much of the talking.” Stark looks around and shakes his head. “Actually, all of you shouldn’t do much of the talking, except maybe Nat over here who could probably charm Fury into, like, wearing a thong in public.” Stark dodges the elbow Romanoff throws at him, but she doesn’t seem too bothered by his assertion. Their prior relationship must not have been too bad, then.

“Just leave it to me,” Stark continues, “and I’ll get all of us out of here in a minute, maybe two if we decide to take a group picture before we start.”

Romanoff snorts. “I’m pretty sure that’s the exact opposite of what we’re supposed to do here.”

Stark rolls his eyes. “According to your boss what we’re supposed to do is let Capsicle here do all the talking, while we stand and smile exactly...” Stark looks down to consult his note card. “One and a half steps behind him.”

Steve’s tempted to react, to call Stark out and ask why he doesn’t seem to think that Steve can answer a few questions, but if nothing else, Steve has learned that Tony Stark is not always what he seems. So instead, he bites his tongue and stares just enough to make Stark uncomfortable enough to elaborate on his current position.

Stark starts to fidget, Steve raises an eyebrow. Stark sighs, and starts gesticulating.

“It’s just....the press is a vulture, ok? And they will eat you up for breakfast, lunch and dinner, maybe even that Fourthmeal I heard Taco Bell has going on, and you aren’t going to have an idea about how to handle that shit.” Stark looks down. “They’re going to ask you all types of stupid questions about things you haven’t even thought of, and they’re going to publish your reaction for the whole world to see. It’s pretty much everyone here’s first time really being a public personality, right?”

Everyone but Steve nods, but when Stark raises his head it’s Steve alone that he seems to be talking to. “I’ve been doing this my whole life, okay? Let me handle it this time, and then once you’ve figured out some of the answers to whatever the hell they’re going to throw at you, I’ll let you have the mic.”

Steve exhales, looks around at his team and nods. When the walk into the conference room five minutes later, Tony and Steve stand side by side, while the rest of the Avengers stand one and a half steps behind them and watch.

Stark starts with a loud and obnoxious hello. Behind him, Steve hears Romanoff snort, which he assumes he was supposed to hear, which must mean that the two of them are sharing a joke together.

 _Baby’s first friend_ , Steve can hear his mother croon in the back of his head. Bucky’s laughing, and has probably made an off color joke about only being able to hit it off with women, the type of joke that old Steve would have smacked him for. It probably wouldn’t have hurt, but it would have been the thought that counted, right? _Sure Steve_ , Bucky in his head replies.

Steve blinks. Bucky is dead. His mother died even before he joined the army in the 40s. Everyone is dead, except for Morita and Peggy. Steve’s in the future now, fighting aliens with Howard’s son as part of the organization Peggy founded. Also, having a mental argument with a very old version of his long dead best friend.

He stares at the crowd in front of him, and tries to tune back into what Tony’s saying.

“The Maria Stark Foundation will be helping with the reconstruction, and no it’s not because I feel guilty, unless you’d like to strap a nuke and fly off into space...”

Steve glances at Stark and notices that he’s clenched his fists at his side, that Tony’s trembling just slightly as he speaks. Steve leans closer to Tony, just enough that his shoulder brushes up against him. He presses, and Tony quiets, finishing his statement and falling into an uncharacteristic silence.

Bucky got like this sometimes, Steve remembers. In the aftermath of whatever those bastards had done to him on the operating table, Bucky would sometimes alternate between silence and screaming, violence and peace in different daily combinations.

Steve takes a breath, and says that he can take a few questions, if anyone would like to ask him some. Tony jolts, tries to interrupt but Steve just squeezes his arm before taking a step forward.

Trauma hasn’t changed in the years he slept, and so Steve finds that this at least, he can do.

He clears his throat again and looks out at the reporters, straightening his shoulders as he shifts back into the USO advertisement, toothpaste smile and all. There’s a photographer in the second row who twitches, so Steve knows it’s working.

“Captain America,” someone begins, “um...welcome, I guess? It’s....it’s good to meet you?”

Steve grins at the person brave enough to ask him the first question of the new century. The reporter stands up and glances ruefully down at her shirt when everyone starts laughing at his shield splashed against a rainbow flag.

“That’s an interesting shirt,” Steve says, “it’s certainly brighter than anything I saw someone wearing before.”

She blushes, tugging at the hem as she mutters that her girlfriend made it for her before snapping her head to stare at Steve with wide, horrified eyes.

Steve suddenly can’t breathe as he thinks about all the conversations in back allies, the homes opened so that couples could just hold hands together, exchange soft kisses without having to bend their knees in case they needed to run. He’d heard about progress, about interracial relationships, hell they’d actually told him that two men or two women could be together without being tossed in jail. That the type of beatings he remembered would now be prosecuted as a hate crime.

It’s still very, very different to see the future in practice: to see this beautiful black woman with hair surrounding her face like a halo wearing his shield on a shirt her girlfriend made her.

She looks like she wants to cry. Steve kind of does too, if he’s being honest.

He clears his throat and tries to bite his lip to keep back a grin he thinks could split his face in half, super serum protecting his skin or not. His mind is a little hazy, so he doesn’t catch the question that’s shouted into the silence that descended, until someone else asks it again.

“Captain America,” the scream says, “How do you feel about the degradation of American moral values, of the Christian values that this country was founded on, that lets these... _homosexuals_ freely flaunt their... _lifestyle_?”

Steve blinks, vaguely notices that the speaker is a squat man in an ill fitting suit and a smug grin pasted on his lips. Steve wants to fight him, but that was only acceptable before he put on the suit, and even then Steve had only gotten away with it because Bucky had always had his back.

Tony steps up, starts speaking about how Captain America isn’t here to talk politics, especially considering how he’d only been here for a week. This is good. This is SHIELD’s position, the one on his notecards.

The woman wearing his shield, the one who seems to live halfway inside the type of future he’d always imagined 70 years forward would be like, she’s pulled on a blazer and isn’t looking at Steve anymore.

 _Not a good soldier, but a good man_ , Steve remembers Erskine saying a lifetime ago. _I don’t like bullies_ , Steve himself had said.

He touches Tony again, and pushes Stark gently behind him. Steve straightens his shoulders and looks right at the reporter, sets his jaw as he looks the guy right in the eye.

“What American values?” Steve asks. “Can anyone tell me what I’m supposed to be fighting for, here in the future?”

“Truth, justice and the American way!” someone shouts. Steve laughs.

“Nice try, but I read a little Superman before I left,” he says. “So what’s the American way?”

He sighs, looking down at his uniform and wishes, once again, that he’d been able to wear anything other than the stars and stripes. His last one was better, he whispers furiously in the back of his mind.

“Strong, conservative Christian values,” the reporter from before says, the squat one Steve wants to fight. “Nuclear families, American exceptionalism, a strong military, strong economy, a free market  and low taxes. Law abiding citizens, faith guided morality, a focus on the traditional family unit. A return back to the Golden Age of our country”

Steve nods, pretending that he doesn’t want to throw up a little in his mouth. He can hear the unease amongst his teammates, who he realizes don’t really understand where he’s going with this either. Steve Rogers the man must not have been spoken of as much as Steve Rogers the myth.

“Anyone else?” he asks, “anything else?”

There’s some more silence, a type of expectant fullness rounding out the air each of them breathe.

“Equality,” the woman wearing his shield says, standing up again. She’s tugging at her blazer, alternating between using it to cover her shirt and revealing what’s underneath. “Separation of church and state...” she stops, looking at the ground before swallowing. When she raises her head, she looks straight at Steve, tugging the blazer off her shoulders and clasping her hands behind her back. The shield is bold and brilliant, and she’s trying to make a point that Steve’s been waiting for 80 years to vocalize.

“The pursuit of happiness, regardless of your original circumstances,” she says. “The ability to pursue that happiness in almost any way it presents itself.”

Steve smiles, ever so slightly. He can feel the entire room holding its breath, the stiffness in the spines all around him. Steve wishes he could look at his teammates before he speaks again, but he likes to think that there are moments in people’s lives that define them.

Steve’s fought aliens, fought Nazis, let himself be remade inside of a metal casket. But each of those were the actions of a good soldier.

Today, he’s going to take his first step towards the second half of his promise. He’s going to try to be a good man.

“Ma’m, I was a chronically ill art student in the 1930s. I was a card carrying socialist, before your Red Scare took away the word’s definition. I led the Army’s first racially integrated unit, fought alongside one of the Allied force’s most formidable officers: Agent Peggy Carter.”

He takes a breath, clutches the fabric of his suit and reminds himself of all the ways people would have to hide back in the day, how much it hurt to see Bucky have to hide love bites on his jaw with a bruise from his fella’s fist. How a fight was a better explanation than a kiss.

“Ma’m, I am what you might call an atheist. Also, what my research on the internet has informed me, bisexual.”

He can hear a pin drop in the wake of his revelations, and moments later he can feel someone take that pin and use it to pop the bubble of silence that has engulfed them all. The Avengers behind him all take a step forward in unison, with Tony Stark’s laughter drowning out anything else Steve can hear for a second.

“Welcome to the dark side,” he hears Stark saying, “we have double the amount of sexy models to ogle at.”

Steve rolls his eyes, thinks of three witty remarks but smiles at Natasha and Banner instead. They both seem to be shocked, but in a good way. Everyone does, he thinks, and that makes him feel a lot better than he had expected it to.

He looks out into the crowd, past all the pandemonium his personal history has created to find the woman in his shirt making her way slowly towards the stage. He jumps down before security can stop her progress, and walks up to her.

She opens her mouth once, twice, before just rushing forward and wrapping her arms around him, tucking her chin into his shoulder as she shakes.

“I’d hoped,” he hears her mutter into the suit. “I just...I knew that you were more....something more than everyone seemed to think, and I hoped that you might be okay with this, and I just...when I was a kid I used to...”

Steve laughs, rubbing her back as she babbles.

“Does your girlfriend take t-shirt orders,” he asks, “or was yours just a one time deal?”

“For Captain America?” she exclaims, “What’s your size?”

“Probably an Extra Large, which let me tell you is quite the change from before,” he says, “and not for Captain America. For...Steve Rogers.” He wrinkles his forehead, thinking about symbolism for a moment. “Actually, for Captain America too, but mostly for Steve Rogers.”

She grips him tighter, kissing his cheek quickly before she wipes her eyes and lets go just as the man he’d hoped to shock into silence regains his vitriol.

“How could you do this to us, to this country!” Steve hears from the crowd. “How could you do this to everything you stood for!” A pause. “It’s that bastard Stark, I’m telling you he’s influenced Captain America with his liberalist, godless propaganda and I won’t stand for it! That fucking whore should never have been allowed near the Captain, and now he’s brainwashed the Captain into following him down to Hell!”

Steve jumps back on stage and purses his lips, trying to keep his Army vocabulary out of his throat. Tony is refusing to meet his eyes as he stares at the wall across from them, tension painted in every line he cuts in his tailored suit.

In a moment of quiet after New York, Steve had done a little research on Tony, nothing more than a google search to see what Howard had done after Steve had died. The press hasn’t exactly been kind to Tony Stark, though Steve knows that the opposite has also been true. He hazards a thought about the type of life he might have lived if he hadn’t crashed into the Atlantic, whether or not he might have watched Tony grow up, whether or not Steve’s presence might have made a difference in the end.

Weird time-travely guilt aside, Steve figures that there really isn’t a reason to allow one of his teammates to be treated like this, as if Stark is a disease he should have avoided. (That was in fact the implication of quite a few articles that mentioned the likelihood of Stark having contracted an STI before he became Iron Man.) Besides, there’s a little part of him that takes offense at the idea that he could have been corrupted by anyone, especially after all the rallies and protests he’d attended half dead from whatever illness he was battling.

Damn it, Steve had _worked_ for his reputation, and if defending it meant he could prop Tony up a little too, then well, he’d take it as a double win for the score sheet. He clears his throat.

“Sir, I fought to give America a chance to move forwards, not backwards." He takes a breath, looking out at the audience before him and juxtaposing them with the reporters he remembered. "Now, the Third Reich was disgusting and I gave what I thought was my life to destroy it, but I was under no illusion that the country I was representing was perfect at the time.”

Steve bites his lip, and tries to remember what exactly he used to fight for, underneath the party lines and national colors he was fed.

“We fight..." he begins, "because America was based on a promise that has never been delivered to the utmost extent that her people deserve." Steve frowns. "But, I believe that we have the ability and the potential to do so.”

He shifts slightly, marshaling his errant thoughts, and the barriers between Steve Rogers and Captain America dissolve until he’s left with some weird uncomfortable mix of the two: a new Captain for a new age, perhaps. A better age, he hopes. He straightens his shoulders, and tries to pitch his voice lower to match the man he played on camera a few times, the myth he knows everyone in the room grew up on. 

“I went to war for the idea of a better America, and died for it too. I don’t know if you remember, but the America I lived in had polio and no microwaves. Also, no Internet, which let me tell you I don’t think I can live without anymore.” He waits for the nervous laughter to die down. “I woke up in a better America, but I’m under no illusion that it is a perfect one, that there aren’t millions of people struggling to realize the American Dream you seem to think is a given.”

The reporter looks like he’d like to interrupt, but Steve crosses his arms in a way he knows will shut him down and tries to figure out what he wants to say: he always knew his habit of starting things he couldn’t end would catch up with him, but he wishes it hadn’t been at a press conference.

Romanoff, of all people, is the one who steps forward. “Captain Rogers is trying to say that he never needed to be corrupted by Mr. Stark, and that he came to his beliefs all on his own. Now, you seem to have insulted both Iron Man _and_ Captain America, which seems like an unwise life choice on your part, but then again: who am I to judge on life choices.”

Steve and Tony snort in unison, sharing a wry grin as they look at Natasha a half step in front of them. She’s clasped her hands behind her, shoulders straight as she glares at the room, daring them to speak. It’s been a long (but not really, not to him) time since Steve Rogers has been part of a team, but in this moment he can feel the weight of the Avengers pressing all around him, the electricity jumping from each of their fingers to the others, the ties that bind solidifying in knots around their wrists.

“Thank you, Black Widow,” he says. Tony laughs, casually slinging an arm behind Natasha to rest on Steve’s shoulder. Steve stiffens for a moment, before shifting just an inch into the weight.

The press in front of them is frantic, and Steve is sure that he’s going to be yelled at quite a bit for going off script. Tony Stark is smiling, wide and lazy and true for what Steve thinks is only the third time since they’d met. Thor is talking about Asgardian sexuality spectrums now, providing the type of detailed examples most people could probably live happily without hearing. Bruce is grinning softly, brushing Steve’s left shoulder before sneaking behind Clint, who is cackling in Tony’s ear.

Natasha, still slightly in front has turned to watch Steve, smirking when he finally notices that she’s caught on, that he can’t hide his growing affection for this new group of people he will fight with.

In the aftermath of what the press is calling “The Battle of New York,” Steve Rogers is confused about many, many things.

A team -- this particular team -- he realizes, is not one of them.

**Author's Note:**

> I have no idea what this is. actually, I do. Wish fulfillment. Socialist!Steve Rogers. Team building. Friendship. I have no idea what the characterization is, and im pretty sure I add in gratuitous monologuing. 
> 
> if you have any feedback, positive or negative, please leave it in the comments below: I'd really like to get better at this thing, and i really do love these characters, even if I've managed to hopelessly butcher them along the way.


End file.
